Bose® RoomMatch® System Chosen for Legacy United Methodist Church in Bismarck, North Dakota

New worship space for longtime area congregation features state-of-the-art sound thanks to Bose® RoomMatch® arrays

Framingham, Massachusetts, March 25, 2014 – Legacy United Methodist Church in Bismarck, North Dakota, opened the doors on its new worship space in late fall 2013, just in time for the holiday season. Featuring contemporary worship and music styles, the church hosts several services each weekend to a large and vibrant congregation. The challenges selecting a sound system were familiar: vocal intelligibility from the pastor and the musicians, a well-balanced sound mix for music, a versatile system for a number of applications, even coverage for the space, and so on. Bismarck-based A/V firm Dakota Sound Systems, Inc., installed a system consisting of RoomMatch® loudspeakers from Bose® Professional Systems, and it has already proven to be the perfect fit for the church, with rave reviews from the congregation and the church’s pastoral staff alike.

“This project was several years in the making,” notes Jay Griffin, Vice President and Co-Owner of Dakota Sound Systems. “Originally, the plan was different, and we had an entirely separate system specified. The project was shelved for a time and reworked, and when we revisited things, the church made it clear that they wanted the best and latest system. This was the perfect opportunity to install our first RoomMatch system. We put together a model of the system for the decision-makers at the church, and it was clear that this would be the right fit for the space and the church’s worship needs.”

The final system consists of the following Bose products: a middle array of RoomMatch RM12040 and RM9020 modules (one unit each), with two RM9060 modules, one on either side of the center array. Processing is handled by a Bose ControlSpace® ESP-00 Series II engineered sound processor, and a Bose PowerMatch® PM8500 power amplifier handles amplification for the system (an additional PM4250 amplifier powers a separate system in the church’s fellowship area).

The church’s Worship Pastor Dan Weigel, who leads music ministry, stated, “We are thrilled with this system. I cannot say enough good things about the coverage of the space, the speech intelligibility, and the smooth, balanced sound. We had a complication with some rafters potentially getting in the way of the dispersion, but Dakota Sound personnel were able to quickly compensate using Bose Modeler® software. Everything is now dialed in perfectly, and it offers us exactly what we need for our style of music and worship. And moving forward, it is versatile enough to handle just about anything we could throw at it, application-wise.”

Griffin continues, “I had not personally been present at the RoomMatch training sessions, so it was unclear to me exactly what this system would be like in comparison to the system we originally specified. Now that I have experienced the system, I can confidently state that it offers great speech intelligibility, but it can be a smack-you-in-the-face music system too. It covers the whole gamut. And it fills the space really well. We’re happy with the way it turned out, and comments from the church have all been positive. It’s an amazing group of products.”